Searching for Authority: Rebellious Readers in Early Modern Texts 1640-1740 (NEMLA 2013)

At a glance, reading may appear to be a passive activity; the solitary reader takes in the words on the page and is in some sense restricted by the scope of whatever is in the text. Because reading is in many ways instructional and can be used to educate or dictate to the reader, in early modern England those in power often used texts to control those classified as inferior or other, whether in the form of the complete denial of literacy or restrictions on what can and cannot be read. But as ...